The Nevada Sagebrush

With a slew of over 300 new features and stunning visual demos, the move from OS X Tiger to Leopard represents a giant step for Apple Inc. toward the massive consumer market and, more specifically, the college market.

For years, Apple has offered student discounts on all their products and now could draw more students to the Mac with Leopard’s eye-catching visuals, education-oriented applications and seamless integration with other Apple products, such as iPod and iPhone.

Rob Griffiths, senior editor at “Macworld” magazine and founder of MacOSXHints.com, said college students are an important target market for Apple.

“With the ability to work with iPod and iPhone, they have a compelling message for the college student,” Griffiths said.

While Macintosh computers have long been geared for creative media professionals like journalists, photographers and producers of audio and video content, Griffiths said Leopard is aimed more toward the common user.

“Many of the big changes target people that are new to the Mac because of the iPod,” he said, “They liked the iPod experience and went to the Mac.”

Because Leopard pays more attention to visuals and user experience, it’s more of a consumer release than a specialist-oriented release, Griffiths said.

“(OS) 10.5 (Leopard) just has a more visually compelling interface — whether you like it or not, it demos really well,” he said. “But there are still a lot of changes under the hood. Good attention was paid to both sides.”

The newly rewritten Finder is now faster and more reliable, while still serving the same simple purpose: organizing files. Spotlight, Mac OS X’s search utility, now supports searching across servers and the use of boolean phrases, like “and” or “or” to make searches quicker and more precise.

For the more advanced user, Leopard comes bundled with a new version of Xcode, its development suite, and improved Terminal, its command line application, and is now a certified UNIX operating system.

Of all the new features of Leopard, Griffiths thinks Time Machine, Leopard’s new backup utility, will be the most appreciated. Time Machine creates incremental back-ups on an external hard drive and allows a user to “go back in time” to retrieve a file, folder, Address Book entry, or even restore an entire system.

“At a consumer level, Time Machine is really gonna change things,” explained Griffiths as he reminisced about grievances from friends and family about lost files. “With Time Machine and the ability to plug in a Firewire drive and not do anything and have backups made, I think that’s revolutionary on a consumer level,” he said.